On books and blackness

Rajneesh Narula

(Another in my
occasional essay series)

I love the London
Review of Books, which has most recently steered me towards Erasure
by Percival Everett by way of a passionate review of his newest oeuvre, I am
not Sidney Poitier. In rather short order I have become convinced that the
man is, in fact, something of a genius.

However, I have
mounted my virtual soapbox on this occasion not to wax lyrical about my
literary adventures nor to regale you with the sense of unbounded joy I feel on
having such good fortune amongst the shelves. This is the second time in the
last year that I have discovered an author who has changed my understanding of
the novel as I know it, the other being Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño is, of course,
now fashionable in bookshops everywhere, after having been anonymous and
unpublished much of his life. Death greatly improves one’s credentials with the
reading public, it would seem.

Instead, this
missive is on the delights and furies of irony, and (of course) the injustices
of being alive but anonymous. Walk with me, dear reader, as I retrace my
thoughts over the last week.

Why had I not
heard of thisPercival Everett, I wondered, by the time I finished
reading the review? Surely such writing should have received greater fanfare?
Wikipedia informed me that Erasure was his fifteenth. I realised that he
was not actually dead, but then neither is Murakami or for that matter Milan
Kundera, father of the modern school of
life-is-deeply-ironic-but-deliciously-unbelievable-and-full-of-coincidence
fiction.

So off I went to
my local library and fruitlessly searched the shelves for his books, and after
some while I realise why not: Percival Everett was filed in an esoteric section
between travel books and poetry that carries the classification, ‘black
fiction’. Now for those of you who have not discovered this quirk of British
and American libraries and bookshops: ‘Black fiction’ does not contain novels
that feature bloodbaths, or documentation of sad and depressing tales that
involve heartbreak, mental asylums and suicide, but books written by people
whose skin colour happens to be a particular shade of non-white. Mr Everett
has been judged guilty of Writing While Black.

I don’t know
what always annoys me most about this. Is it the presumption that ‘black
fiction’ is of interest only to people of a certain (similar) colour? That if
you were not black, you would probably not want to stop and read any of these
books? That the experience of being black is something that colours your
writing style, plots, and choice of metaphor? More so than being white, brown,
yellow or an effervescent shade of pink? Even more worrying is the possible
presumption that people of a certain colour will write similar works. That the
blackness of one’s skin will be the dominant factor in one’s life, overpowering
all other stimuli, such as ethnicity, religion, upbringing? That Chinua
Achebe’s novels are somehow similar to Zadie Smith’s by virtue of the odd grand
parent or so being from the same continent, and thus should be catalogued
together? (I note with some amusement though, that Hindu Myths rubs
shoulders with Complete Lyrics of Bob Marley. Make of that what you
will).

Is there a
community of readers that will seek to read exclusively novels of non-white
writers, regardless of their literary merits? There is an even more annoying
implied presumption that novels by black writers are somehow not quite as good
to be filed with the other books. Now there are occasions when I think that
there is need for honesty in publishing, and that certain books should not be
permitted to see the light of day, but sadly, are. Publishers have lovers and
children who can’t (shouldn’t) write, and sugar daddy/mommy drops the standards
a bit. There are books from vanity publishers as well.

There are of
course publishers that specialise in the Experience of Being Black in America. This latter subject is a US-specific thing (nowadays called ‘African American
Literature’, because ‘black’ is much more restrictive and politically
incorrect), one that preoccupies much of the African-American mainstream media.
There is a case to be made for such books to be so classified, as this genre of
publishing addresses the pathos of a community that still struggles with their
sense of identity (witness the travails of Obama who is castigated for not
being ‘black enough’). Should you seek to understand your/their place in America, such a section makes sense.

But Zadie Smith,
Chinua Achebe and Ngozie Adichie speak to a wider audience. Theirs are not
tales specific to their backgrounds, but speak to the human condition at
large. The colour of their own skin, and that of their protagonists is
incidental to their themes. The conflicts their characters experience are those
of people who struggle to find their place in the world, a changing world where
cultures and multi-culturalism collides. Middle class desires, the angst of
never being able to go home, the loss of identity, the sense of heartbreak, all
are the same whether you are in Cairo, Karachi, Crouch End or Kaduna.

My local library
is in Westminster, where most people are thankfully unaware of the politics and
paradoxes of US skin colour beyond their annual holiday in Florida. Some may be
rubbing their nose against questions of identity, but by and large, most are
solidly middle class and even drive BMWs. Surely, here in damp and bourgeois
Maida Vale, perhaps a bigger section in our local library is called for,
dedicated to all ‘mediocre fiction’, thereby eschewing parochialism?

But I digress.

But the Irony
that I mentioned earlier is not just because of the silliness of the genre
chosen to condemn it to. Irony comes in six-pack on this occasion, because Monk
(the main character in Erasure) is continuously seeking ways to have his
personality not be stereotyped by his colour (which happens to be black, or at
least milk-chocolate). Indeed, the irony gets thicker because the character
also happens to be a writer of serious fiction, who stops by a local Borders
bookshop. As all authors do, he looked himself up:

I went to Literature and did not see me. I went to
Contemporary Fiction and did not find me, but when I fell back a couple of
steps I found a section called African American Studies, and there, arranged
alphabetically and neatly, read undisturbed,
were four of my books including my Persians
of which the only thing ostensibly African American was my jacket photograph. (pg 34)

Just so.

There was no
jacket photograph on Erasure, but the cover photo did show a black kid. Like
Monk, (and for Everett, Achebe, Smith and Adichie) I also felt irate, because
apart from depriving the average reader of a great book, the author of an
income, it promotes and maintains a literary apartheid not just among readers,
but among and between authors. Authors are supposed to stick to the genres to
which they were born, or at least ones that they have written themselves into
successfully. Where was the genre police I wondered? Surely Monica Ali, Jhumpa
Lahiri, Vikram Seth, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, all need to be pulled back
from the ‘normal’ shelves and returned to the reservation? Or do they pass some
sort of test, DNA-based perhaps, or even literary, that allows them free
passage away from the ‘special interest’ sections?

And no sooner
had I thought this, Everett chucks in some more irony– Monk, the long
suffering, non-white, non-basketball-playing unappreciated author and
academic (and who does not come from a broken-home, and who is a grandson, son,
and brother to educated folk) writes a book dripping with stereotypes and
clichés of the kinds that he has had no personal experience, as a homage to bad
writing, but which fits what society expects him to have experienced.
Naturally, the book becomes a mainstream bestseller, and the critics’ rave about
how it could only have come out of personal experience.

All this would
be especially delicious if it were not also so tedious in its repetition. I
wish we could move on: black (or any other colour, racial or ethnic group)
should not be necessary and sufficient basis to summarise a person’s likes,
dislikes, habits, preferences follies, fetishes and novels.

These are
matters close to my heart. I continually suffer from identity crises. Most
recently, I was disturbed to find that my biography on World Who’s Who
reads, ‘British Economist and Academic’. I object to be so classified, not
least because I lay no claim to be British, or an Economist. It is the broader
principle of the stereotypes, as discussed above. On the one hand, I recognise
that humans have a need for classification to comprehend the complexity of
their world. On the other, it is cruel that one is expected to live up to
people’s expectations based on the stereotypes that you make no claim to, but
are nonetheless yours for no other reason than the dull imaginations of others.
This is not limited to western thinking: much of the carnage in Africa and Asia
comes down to the alienation of different peoples living cheek-by-jowl but
otherwise separate, distanced by stereotype and rumour. We (for I am a product
of my upbringing) are bound by stereotypes, passed down and internalised, but
never questioned.

My Indian
heritage does not mean I love curries, enjoy econometrics or bollywood
blockbusters. Feeling Nigerian does not imply I have any knowledge of scam
letters or that I should be black and love football. Having a Dutch passport
should not imply blond and tall, with a predilection for wooden shoes and
cheese. Being an academic does not imply that I am especially dense about
non-academic things, or that I am especially intelligent and knowledgeable.
Others are true. Being divorced does make you more self-protective and less
likely to trust. I am profoundly non-vegetarian with a deep love of dead cows,
I do like cheese, I have begun to enjoy Indian classical music, and I see
nothing wrong with polygamy and a well-formed derriere.

Everett’s theme
(and mine) is by no means new: Shakespeare did it brilliantly 400 years ago in Othello.
It is not the colour of a man’s skin that defines his value and his virtues, or
his vices.